Lamar Keene was the go-to man in 1960s America if you wanted to speak with the spirit world. His likeable schtick and flash, white wardrobe helped him to coax grief-stricken relatives into parting with huge sums of cash which supported his spiritualist church services. But the séances were an elaborate hoax, as he revealed in his 1976 whistleblowing exposé The Psychic Mafia, which killed his own career at the same time.

Panorama and ex-Guardian journalist Vicky Baker (who worked on BBC Radio 4's Fake Heiress podcast, the subject of which is now screening as Inventing Anna on Netflix) had been digging for a similar con-artist story and struck on an intriguing nugget of gold with Keene's book. Her six-part series uses extracts from his fascinating memoir alongside new investigative research of her own to tell the story of a convincing charlatan eaten up with guilt later in life.

Some dramatised scenes verge on the cartoonish (a syrupy camp Keene is voiced by Edward Hogg), especially when the true story would have been bonkers enough without them. Much more successful is Baker's retelling of her own private detective work where she tracks down living relatives, experts on the psychology of scams and, quite unexpectedly, a passionate parrot breeder. The last two episodes accelerate with weird plot twists and a brilliant spooky coincidence, the kind that must have freaked out Keene in much the same way that Whoopi Goldberg's fraudster medium got the heebie-jeebies in Ghost.

The depths of grief, delusion and faith that fuel the human desire to hear from loved ones after they have shuffled off this mortal coil are examined through interviews with fellow mediums. There's also one talking head who explains the True Believer syndrome, a term used by Keene in his book, which allows people to ignore often glaring evidence that they are being duped.

Fake Psychic is available now on BBC Sounds.